[hencq]

> JIT, in Lean, does not mean no buffer, it means as little of a buffer as you can get away with.

Yeah, spot on. One of my college professors used to compare it to a river with rocks in it. If you want to safely sail on the river, you can either a) keep the water level high enough or b) remove the rocks. In a production system inventories/buffers are the water level and variance is the rocks. The philosophy of JIT is to remove as much variance from your system as possible so you can lower your buffers. If you have identified areas of high variance you're forced to keep buffers until you've removed enough variance to lower your buffers.

[pishpash]

Or, you've lowered your water to barely cover the rocks so one little mishap and you've capsized.